News & Media

Resources Minister Madeleine King has warned gas producers they risk damaging their social licence and playing into the hands of the Greens if they fail to provide stable supply and affordable prices to consumers.

The comments came after new data yesterday pointed to major gas shortfalls in Western Australia from 2029, and after Greens leader Adam Bandt ramped up attacks on state and federal Labor and the gas sector for dragging down the country’s push to net zero emissions.

‘‘Shortages, or even forecasts of shortages, of Australian gas for Australian customers only play into the hands of those who would seek to close the industry down,’’ Ms King said in a speech to the Australia-Japan roundtable attended by the Consul-General of Japan, Yasushi Naito.

Mr Bandt has rejected the need for more gas extraction and in July said the Greens would demand laws to restrict export contracts to force major gas companies to divert supply into the domestic market in the event of a hung parliament at the next election, Ms King told attendees the Greens ‘‘either don’t understand or pretend not
to understand’’ that a vast amount of exported gas comes from WA and the Northern Territory and there is no east west pipeline to get it to NSW and Victoria where shortfalls were forecast in the immediate term.

‘‘They also ignore the fact these gas projects would not exist at all were it not for the investment and demand of Japan and other nations,’’ she said.

Not far away from the lunch in the federal electorate of Perth, Mr Bandt was railing against the gas industry in a bid to win his party’s first lower house seat in the west. The party, which fields two senators from WA, believes the inner-city seat held by Labor’s Patrick Gorman is its best chance.

A housing crisis on the west coast, where rental vacancies have hovered below 1 per cent for years, paired with state and federal Labor’s advocacy of gas, will form the two key pillars in the Greens’ campaign for Perth.

The Greens success in Brisbane at the 2022 federal election, where Max Chandler-Mather wrestled the innercity electorate of Griffith from highprofile Labor member Teri Butler, has emboldened the party in its pursuit of a lower house seat in the mining state of WA.

Asked about the Greens’ chances of winning a lower house seat in WA, where tens of thousands of people are employed in the resources sector, Mr Bandt said the party had been underestimated in Queensland before 2022.

‘‘Our message to people of WA who work in the resources sector is that there’s still a future for resources in WA, it’s just that it won’t be in those areas that have been cooking the planet on gas. It’s going to be in renewables and that’s going to be in other areas of mining,’’ Mr Bandt said.

Responding to the comments, WA Premier Roger Cook said gas would play a crucial role in the state’s energy transition away from coal-fired power, and walking away from the fuel would only increase power prices.

As Labor and the Greens debated the future of gas, a report by independent energy consultancy EnergyQuest yesterday warned the state was facing a domestic shortfall from 2029.

The report found WA’s bid to turn off its coal-fired power plants by 2030 would create extra demand for gas in the next decade.

‘‘New supply from the Scarborough project and Perth Basin will be important in coming years, but beyond those projects there aren’t many options for increasing domestic supply other than to rely even more on LNG exporters’’, EnergyQuest chief executive Rick Wilkinson said.